Queer Oakland: Julia Serano uses activism, art to save the day

Julia Serano went to Columbia University and earned her Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics well before she made the decision to transition.

She was quite aware of how things work, the biological process and all its wonders. One could hardly call her decision silly, or uninformed, or artificial in any sense.

By day she works as a researcher in a University of California, Berkeley, lab, by night she’s performed as a slam poet, played guitar and lead vocals for her pop band Bitesize and articulated her feminist/trans/activist perspectives in works of non-fiction. She could be the superhero we’ve all been waiting for: the left-brained crusader for total liberation, the “masculine” shell that transmuted into raw girl power, the critical resistance of take-no-sh– politics defeating monstrous incarnations of ignorance.